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My friend Ed has a theory about Lionel Messi. He says that given football’s popularity, scale, global reach and ease of access, the competition to reach its elite ranks is harder than in any other field, let alone sport.

And so, he argues, there is a case for saying that Messi is not just the best footballer in history, but better, in fact, than any human has ever been at anything: Einstein, Michelangelo, Perry Como. How big was the talent pool of 16th-century Western playwriting? Perhaps Shakespeare was just the wordiest of an averagely-wordy bunch.

What is certainly true is that Messi’s fame and ubiquity have turned him into a sort of keyboard shortcut for generic excellence, with often amusing results.

'Wirral angler Jamie is the Messi of the waterways’, reads a recent headline from the Liverpool Echo. Multiple world champion bowler Alex Marshall is frequently described as the ‘Messi of bowls’. Meanwhile, Charlotte Dujardin’s London 2012 dressage mount Valegro has been dubbed ‘the Lionel Messi of horses’, which is cleverer than it sounds, as horses also lack the most basic understanding of tax law.

Describing Steph Curry as ‘the Messi of basketball’, then, is three things: a headline to light up the internet, unforgivably lazy, and strangely appropriate. Curry makes the comparison himself: he reckons both are feel players, flair players, players who dare to surprise. Yet there are more than cosmetic similarities between the greatest footballer alive and the Golden State Warriors point guard breaking all sorts of records in the NBA.

Curry sinks three-pointers like other players sink free throws. His miraculous 38-foot last-second match-winning shot against Oklahoma City on Saturday was just the latest in a string of outrageous efforts that have redrawn the geometry of basketball. Just as Messi has redefined the art of the possible in terms of scoring, Curry opens up areas of the court previously thought safe for defences.

There was a time when the origin stories of great athletes were not too dissimilar to those of the people who paid to watch them. Dixie Dean used to join Everton fans in the pub after games. Tom Finney would spend the week working as a plumber. They were geniuses, but they were our geniuses.

And in many sports, and at the lower levels of all, that umbilical link remains: between the athlete and the culture that created them.

But in some arenas, elite sportsmen and women are not so much drawn from society as siphoned out of it at the earliest possible juncture.

Footballers are funnelled into the academy system at pre-pubescence and cultivated like orchids. Your average international rugby player has probably been drinking whey protein since the age of 13.

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As brilliant and charming as the likes of Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic are, theirs is an ungraspable, unintelligible genius: a misty science of hyperbaric chambers and isotonic points, as far removed from the game you might see at your local club as that game is from Swingball.

The gulf between “them” and us is wider than it has ever been. Socially, the very biggest stars barely intersect with real life at all, drifting between gated estates, first-class lounges and cordoned-off VIP areas through Instagram filters and gilded wormholes filled with other millionaire athletes. Physically, they may as well be a different species.

And this has ramifications: whereas we once watched athletes to see something of ourselves – our avatars on the field – now their relationship with us is more akin to that of a deity with its subjects.

Curry, on the one hand, would appear to follow this model to the letter.

The son of a former NBA player, he was earmarked for greatness almost from birth: a childhood spent in professional locker rooms, a youth spent burning up the college game. But there is something disarmingly human to him too. He is 6ft 3in and barely 13st; not especially quick or strong; polite and essentially normal. “I probably relate more to the casual fan who watches the game,” he once said. “Not super-athletic, not this crazy monster of physical stature.”

Therein, perhaps, lies the uniqueness of his appeal. A human in a world of superhumans: we will never be able to emulate Steph Curry, but somehow, his familiar essence gives us hope that someday we could.

Perhaps it is true that “a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility”, as Aristotle once said: or, to give his proper title, the Lionel Messi of Greek philosophy.